Preparing racing’s next generation
Oconomowoc team sets path to Indy
OCONOMOWOC – The son of an accomplished race-car driver, Augie Pabst III set his sights on becoming one as well.
Instead he became a mechanic, negotiator, family counselor, travel agent, accountant, fixer, big brother and surrogate father to an international parade of youngsters, most of whom have a better chance to succeed at a higher level than he ever did.
And 24 seasons after he saw his career on the track beginning to stall, Pabst is still in racing, playing an important role in the sport's future.
“It just sort of accidentally happened, and all of a sudden here we are,” said Pabst, 47.
“Here” is an unassuming steel building at the end of a long driveway that winds through the woods.
Semi trucks parked outside hint at what happens. Bay after bay of small-scale, open-cockpit race cars in various states of completion give a clearer picture of what happens there. A trophy case would help tell the story.
Some of Pabst Racing Services' past can be seen Saturday and Sunday when NTT IndyCar Series rookie Rinus Veekay and part-timer Dalton Kellett line up for the REV Group Grand Prix doubleheader weekend at Road America in Elkhart Lake. Both are graduates.
But the future is on display first, when the USF2000 and Indy Pro 2000 series race Thursday and Friday at the 4-mile road course in Sheboygan County that the team considers its home track. The team fields cars for five prospects across the two Road to Indy steppingstone series.
“It's taken quite a few years to build a team performance-wise for the quality of driver that we're contending for championships and wins,” said Pabst, who raced his own car from 1991-97 and along the way began preparing cars for others in amateur competition.
“When you get your results and performance to a level that people feel you're one of a couple of teams that people want to go to, it makes it a lot easier to secure those drivers and get commitments from people. It's kind of fulfilling in a way, being involved with talented kids and seeing them learn the ropes and go to the next level.”
Open-wheel racing development is a quirky and often cutthroat business.
The model is this: Aspiring drivers hoping to make the jump from go-karts vie for the opportunity to bring a six-figure budget to a team that will give them a chance to advance into cars and then up the ladder, ideally to IndyCar or possibly one of the international series.
A season in USF2000 would start at about $325,000. The amount of testing – which is vital to development – and the expense of crashes affect the total bill. Indy Pro 2000 is the next step, starting around $525,000. From there, a driver could reasonably hope to move up to Indy Lights, although the series is on hiatus this season due to the schedule confusion related to the coronavirus pandemic. All series offer “scholarships” for their champions to help them advance.
“There really isn't this same structure to the ladder system anywhere else,” Pabst said. “It sells itself around the world.”
In addition to Veekay and Kellett, drivers who've passed through Pabst include Austin Cindric, who turned his attention to NASCAR; Rasmus Lindh, who had planned to be in Indy Lights this season; and Kaylen Frederick, who moved on to F3 in Europe.
Pabst has won the past three USF2000 team championships and came within five points of its
SLINGER NATIONALS
The Slinger Nationals, postponed by storms Tuesday night, ended too late for this edition Wednesday night. Find coverage at jsonline.com and in the newspaper Friday. first drivers title last year with Hunter McElrea.
The team's full-time competitors this year are McElrea, a 20year-old, California-born Australian, and Colin Kaminsky, 21, from the Chicago area, who moved up together into Indy Pro 2000; and Yuven Sundaramoorthy, a 17year-old University of Wisconsin freshman-to-be who was born in Oconomowoc, Eduardo Barrichello, the 18-year-old son of retired Formula One driver Rubens Barrichello, and 20-year-old Englishman Matthew Round-Garrido.
“All or our drivers now, we have a really quality stable of drivers,” Pabst said. “On any given day, you can expect to see them in P1.”
The group also is also fairly low maintenance; in fact McElrea and Kaminsky were collectively nicknamed “peanut butter and jelly.” The importance of that can't be overstated for Pabst, who has to balance egos, manage families, mend fences and bring together about 20 people from around the country on race weekends.
Experience and age have helped – Pabst and his wife have a 19year-old son and 20-year-old daughter – but dealing with the four-wheel equivalent of Little League parents proved challenging earlier as the team grew.
“We've had some amazing parents, and more often than not they're good, but we've had some really, really tough ones, really, really hard personalities,” Pabst said. “And when you can sense they're negatively influencing the driver – not intentionally, just naturally – you're trying to manage the team, as far as mechanics and engineers, and then you're trying to manage the driver and you're trying to manage the parent and you're trying to manage the dynamic between the parent and the driver.
“We've seen it from super-extreme cases to cases where you never even meet the parents. There's usually one or two here or there where they make it to maybe one race a year or something, whether it's business related, or travel or sometimes it's travel based on the fact that their budget is really tight and it's being spent on the car and not getting Mom and Dad to the track.”
That diversity of experience is one of the things Pabst has found enriching about the path he and his team have taken. That, and winning.
Pabst is comfortable staying where he is – in Oconomowoc, his lifelong home, rather than in the sport's hub of Indianapolis – and competing at the level the team does.
The shop has fielded a variety of cars over the years, also prepares an SCCA club-racer's Formula Atlantic and has done some vintage racing. Indy Lights would be a possibility, but it's never been a pull for Pabst. The Indianapolis 500 is intriguing, but to race competitively would probably require partnering with another team and “renting performance,” which runs counter to what the team typically has done.
So for the foreseeable future, this little shop in the woods is likely to keep turning out drivers on the way to those levels.
“It doesn't matter who they are, we just want them to win,” Pabst said. “If they're in our car, they need to be winning. And obviously when you have three cars in one series, somebody isn't going to win, but if we could have top threes every weekend, that would check all the boxes.”